Link to the editorial note and the panel discussion can be found here.

Their fantasies are—can I get married and be happy? Can I own a small car and not worry about petrol prices? Life can be very hard in India, so for two hours, I’ll give them real fantasy.

— Shah Rukh Khan, 2013 (qtd. in Bhattacharya 2021)

Wo kabhi Rahul hai, kabhi Raj

Kabhi Charlie toh kabhi Max

Surinder bhi wo, Harry bhi wo

Devdas bhi our Veer bhi

Ram, Mohan, Kabir bhi

Wo Amar hai, Samar hai

Rizwan, Raees, Jehangir bhi.

Shayad isliye kuch logon ke halak mein fasta hai,

 Ki ek Shahrukh mein pura Hindustan basta hai

— Akhil Katyal (qtd. from HT Entertainment Desk 2021)

24 February 2023. A sunny morning in Pune. The two of us had just finished our breakfast and entered a conference hall, where Gita Chadha, the editor of this series and a dear friend, was huddling over Pushpesh (Kumar) and Deepa (Sreenivas). As my (Sayantan’s) habit goes, I poked my ears into the conversation (what else are conferences for if not eavesdropping); the poking became even more deliberate when I heard the word “Pathaan”. It so happened that Gita was planning a series of articles that would deliberate on the recently released Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster; the idea was to think about why some of us watched the movie, and why some of us liked it.

I volunteered myself and Bishal to prepare a contribution, claiming that we would write about whether we can queer our gaze of the movie. Both of us had recently watched the movie, and my rather hurried proposal was perhaps a result of seeing Shah Rukh Khan and John Abraham come close to each other on more than one occasion in the movie. Gita promptly agreed.

As we began writing this essay, our excitement soon dampened. We watched the movie several times together, made furious notes, and debated whether there is any real possibility of finding ‘queer nuggets’ in a movie that was conforming to everything we saw as ‘unqueer’: the overt allegiance to a nationalism that cast its shadow over the entire movie and the paradigm of overarching heterosexuality (“heteronorm”) to which Shah Rukh Khan continued to return. The movie, most definitely, wasn’t queer, despite instances in the movie that could be easily (mis)read as homoerotic: Shah Rukh Khan’s “bilemma¹” as his gaze shifts from Deepika Padukone to fixate over John Abraham in a swimming pool, the way Khan’s and Abraham’s faces almost brush against each other at one instance, and the number of times the two are on top of each other – sometimes interlocked and sometimes in embrace, and sometimes flying in the sky – as they perform their well-choreographed ‘action’ sequences.

It is then that we were reminded that queering too requires deliberate ‘action’, although one can afford to deny strict choreography. What began next was a search for ways in which one can deliberately queer the seemingly unqueer. Luckily, we landed upon two scholars who we have had the pleasure of reading (and one of whom is also a contributor to this series): Eve Kofosky Sedgewick and Pushpesh Kumar. Sedgewick, a queer theorist, gives us the method of “reparative reading” as opposed to “paranoid reading” (1997), while Pushpesh, a sociologist (and a friend who we have always referred to by his first name), talks about “squinting through queer eyes” (2018).

In 1997, Sedgewick proposed in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You” an alternative method of reading, which she called “reparative reading”. This was set up not necessarily in contrast to the conventional way of reading critically – what Sedgewick called “paranoid reading” –, but an alternative that could take the work of reading further. According to Sedgewick, as Danika Ellis rightly points out, “paranoid reading” approaches a work from a defensive position. It anticipates bad actors and maliciousness, seeking out clues for them” (2021). In other words, “paranoid reading” captures, in Sedgewick’s words, a “hermeneutic of suspicion”. In clarifying how reparative reading is distinct from its paranoid counterpart, Sedgewick says,

…the X-ray gaze of the paranoid impulse…sees through an unfleshed skeleton of the culture; the paranoid aesthetic on view here is one of minimalist elegance and conceptual economy. The desire of a reparative impulse [what Sedgewick previously refers to as one feature of “queer reading”], on the other hand, is additive and accretive…it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. (p. 27)

That is, while paranoid reading strips a text to reveal its hidden violences, reparative reading ascribes to the text what the text itself doesn’t know it contains. Thus, we realised that stripping Pathaan of its heteronorm to excavate a queer bone would do injustice to the labour and/of love that we had put into watching the film; instead, perhaps the task ahead was to heal the movie of its heteronorm by ascribing to it a queer potential that the film itself – perhaps – didn’t know it could contain. In other words, rather than restricting our reading of the film to a queer gaze, our task was to renarrate (Baker 2014) parts of the story through a queer gaze.

We soon realised that queer-gazing at the film for a reparative reading would still require queer eyes. It is here that Pushpesh’s register of “squinting through queer eyes” came as a single but foundation-shaking leaf, much like the one that Shah Rukh Khan points at in a riveting faceoff with Amitabh Bachchan in Mohabbatein (2000). In a very telling 2018 essay, Kumar draws from Satish Deshpande’s definition of the task of a sociologist as “squinting”, i.e., looking through a “double vision” (Kumar 2018). Kumar then makes an arduous effort: he ‘squints’ through queer eyes – what he calls “squinting through a critical queer perspective” – to “investigate a few institutions of common interest in Indian Sociology – caste, class, social movement and globalisation.” In this foundation-shaking effort that only justifies his mohabbat for (Indian) sociology, he reveals the need for Indian sociology to incorporate a queer perspective, while also giving Indian sociology registers that allow the possibilities of its queering. Pushpesh’s reading of Indian sociology, in line with Sedgewick, was an attempt to repair the discipline of its heteronormative affliction. For us, this revealed the possibility of squinting through queer eyes at Pathaan to repair its heteronorm.      

Like Pathaan in Pathaan, in this short essay, we undertake an attempt at Kintsugi: we squint through queer eyes to perform a reparative reading of the movie. To do so, we look at one register that is of concern to contemporary queer (and trans) discourse: that of the (chosen) family.

We agree that at times our deliberations may seem ‘excessive’ and, yet, it is this very excess that we wish to ascribe to the film. As queer people, trans people and feminist people, us being ‘fans’ of Shah Rukh have often been seen as an excess, in ways that are not very different from how we are seen otherwise. We have been asked, on countless occasions, why must we be ‘fans’ (as in ‘fanatics’). Why can’t we claim to like some of his films? Why can’t we like him in some roles? At the heart of these questions are more provocative and unsettling ones: how can we be feminists – or queer or trans or, for that matter, political – while being fans of Shah Rukh? Our response has been what Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel call their “anthology of radical trans poetics”: “We want it all” (2020).

Thus, we have no qualms in acknowledging that the reading we offer here is fantastical; after all, the right to offer real fan-tasy is not only Shah Rukh’s.

Family/Nation: Rejection and Belonging in Pathaan

Siddharth Anand’s Pathaan pits against each other two organisations: Nandini’s (Dimple Kapadia) “JOCR” (Joint Operations and Covert Research), a special unit of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW; India’s key international intelligence agency), and Jim’s (John Abraham) “Outfit-X”, a corporatised terrorist organisation that claims to have no ideological allegiance and works ‘on contract’. JOCR, put together by Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan) while recovering from injuries he sustained during a mission, is composed primarily of soldiers who were retired before time due to past injury or trauma. On the other hand, Outfit-X is a collective of ex-soldiers from top military intelligence agencies across the world – including Rubai (Deepika Padukone) from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI; Pakistan) – who have been betrayed or disenchanted by their ‘parent’ organisations or, in Jim’s case, their ‘parent’ countries.

On squinting, however, the differences between the two organisations get backgrounded as the similarities emerge. Both organisations comprise individuals whose relationship with their ‘parent’ organisation – or their ‘parent’ country – has changed. In the case of JOCR, the involuntary “retirement” invokes a feeling not very different from “rejection”: the soldiers are deemed unfit for catering to the needs of their parent milieu and, therefore, compelled to leave. In the case of Outfit-X, the movie gives us one concrete story: that of Jim, the leader, who was an ex-RAW agent and whose wife and unborn child were brutally murdered by Somalian terrorists when the RAW refused to negotiate with them. Jim feels betrayed by the country that he proclaims as his “lover” and, thus, despite his proclaimed lack of a personal agenda, seeks revenge through his terrorist group. Here, it is the agents who reject their parent countries – instead of the countries rejecting them – and collectivise, albeit towards the goal of global terror.

The rejection by/of a parent body and a reconstitution of the rejected/rejecting individuals under a new collectivity reminds us of the relationship between queer and transgender people, and their natal and chosen families. For instance, Agaja Puthan Purayil’s ethnographic work with transgender men in Bengaluru reveals that transgender men are dissociated from their natal families or parental homes either when they are kicked out due to their gender nonconformity, or when they choose to reject their violent and oppressive natal families (2022). In the case of JOCR and Outfit-X, we find similar trajectories: Soldiers who are seen as incompetent to contribute to the military cause, like queer and transgender people are seen as incompetent to contribute to the cis-heteronormative cause of procreation and caste endogamy, are cast out of their parent organisations to eventually coalesce into JOCR². On the other hand, the feeling of betrayal leads to soldiers rejecting their parent organisations and collectivising under the leadership of Jim to form a transnational private terrorist network.

Puthan Purayil also uses Bourdieu’s concept of “practical kinship” to define the kinship structures she observes in her ethnography of migrant transgender men. As per Bourdieu (1977), practical kinship comprises structures that are continually maintained to serve the practical interests of the individuals. In Pathaan, both JOCR and Outfit-X are built to serve the practical interests of the individuals involved; in the case of JOCR, the interest appears to be that of servitude to the country (or to heal, repair, recover and belong, if one were to squint), and in the case of Outfit-X, the interest seems to be working and charging at one’s own will, as Jim proudly proclaims.

Complicating the understanding of queer-trans kinship networks in India, Pushpesh Kumar (2020) draws from his ethnography of transfeminine groups in India – like the Hijras and Shivashaktis – to argue for a “hybrid existence” of queer individuals – one where the said individual is both connected to their natal families while also maintaining their alternative/practical kinship networks. Perhaps here one must consider the case of Rubai, who puts in the labour to both maintain her network with her ‘parent’ organisation/country as an undercover ISI agent, while simultaneously maintaining her practical network with Outfit-X, to whom she is an “ex”-ISI agent. Further, if we were to think of marital families of cisgender heterosexual women as practical kinship structures – those that serve the ‘practical’ interests of heterosexuality, caste endogamy and procreation –, then Rubai’s negotiation of her relationship with her ‘parent’ country and Outfit-X appears as not very different from how women negotiate complex relationships with their natal and marital families.

Finally, we ask if the two organisations – JOCR and Outfit-X – can be understood as “home”. As Puthan Purayil points out, Blunt and Downing (2006) identify the relationship between identity and power as one of the key constituents of home space. In the case of JOCR, associating with the newly formed organisation allows the involuntarily retired members an opportunity to reclaim their identity as a “soldier”, while in the case of Outfit-X, association with the organisation for the members means the ability to claim power over the nations that once held power over them and to live their lives on their “own terms”. Thus, a queer reparative reading of Pathaan potentiates, perhaps, the imagination of militarised collectivities as “home”, especially when they allow the rejected reclamation of identity and power.

Home, Nation and Identity

Even as we engage in this fan-tastical reading, we are aware (perhaps even “paranoid”) of the dangers of reading queerness into acts of militarism and terrorism, and military and terrorist collectivities. And yet, our reading is a methodological provocation (or perhaps, a “perversion” as Abi-Karam and Gabriel call their provocations to Amiri Baraka’s slogan “We Want it All…The Whole World”) – one that demonstrates the possibilities of a queer ascription to otherwise unqueer texts – in the face of global and national realities where the relationships between the military, global acts of terror and queer individuals are becoming highly complex and intertwined. For instance, there appears to be a steady advocating for queer and trans people in the US to be allowed to serve in the military, which might be seen as a move towards “increasing the social acceptance of queer and trans people” despite the possibilities of legitimising “US military imperialism” and increasing the “likelihood of more queer and trans people being abused and traumatized in the US military” (Spade and Belkin 2021). Further, the militarizing and masculinising tendencies of the US LGBT movement have been critiqued in the past for constructing a “ready, willing and able” homonormativity (Montegary 2015). In contrast, militarised pride in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia has been shown to perform different “paradoxical and sometimes ambiguous political work in achieving LGBTQ visibility and equality” (Irvine and Irvine 2017). In the context of India, Nishant Upadhyay has argued that the Hindu nationalist project deploys “queerness to propagate its Islamophobic, casteist, and homohindunationalist agendas” (2020). Thus, we recognise the complexity of the discourse around the relationship between militarism, state-sanctioned violence and imperialism, and queerness. Our stance is clear: we are opposed to the military and its nationalist and imperialist tendencies. Thus, we are paranoid of our reparative reading, and yet, we are interested in the possibility of ascribing queerness to all that we can (remember, “we want it all”?), the movie Pathaan being one such entity. It is in this spirit that we must once again invoke Sedgewick, who reminds us that a reparative reading is not a contradiction to a paranoid reading, but that the two exist in a dialogic relationship. It is in this spirit we continue.

This leads us to ask if there are other instances of family, nation and kinship constitution in Pathaan that are relatively more hopeful. This is when the name of the movie – and the hero – become crucial. Pathaan tells Rubai in the movie that he is unaware of his natal family and the religion he was born into. Pathaan – now a vulnerable amnesiac – was raised by the nation, he claims. As Paromita Vohra points out in her essay in this series, “memory returns to the amnesiac in shards and fragments” (2023). And yet, this is one shard that doesn’t return to Pathaan or his audience, nor does the audience – or Pathaan – miss its absence. The gap – or crack, if you will – is filled, like in Kintsugi. In a particular encounter in an Afghan village, it is Pathaan’s act of heroism that got him assimilated into the community and, owing to the love and care he received from the community while he was recovering from his injuries, he decided that they were his chosen family and that he was “Pathaan”. “Pathaan” then not only becomes his chosen name but also his chosen identity (in fact, his name before he took “Pathaan” remains unrevealed throughout the movie – as if it is ‘dead’). This transnational chosen family is where Pathaan finds a home and a sense of belonging³.

Yet, this chosen family is not outside the (Indian) nationalist cause. When the danger of Raktbeej – the mutated smallpox virus that an Indian scientist engineered under pressure from Jim – lurks over India, Pathaan calls upon his chosen family to play their part in saving the nation from this terror. His chosen kin dress up as victims of smallpox, lie on the ground, and help Pathaan apprehend Jim’s team when they come to investigate. The Indian nation-state could have very well been destroyed beyond repair had this transnational chosen family not come into action. Pathaan, therefore, subsumes a transgressive kinship collectivity into the nationalist agenda (a danger that might also be lurking in the alternative kinship structures many queer and transgender persons in India live in) while simultaneously constructing this chosen kinship collectivity as the real saviour of the nation (i.e., the ‘parent’ collectivity) – a fan-tasy that queer-trans people know to be real.

But Pathaan is not necessarily about a country under a viral threat; it is also about celebration. One that launches Shah Rukh Khan back into his fandom, and one that counters the right-wing hatred that the movie received once its trailers went public. This is where Pathaan’s early articulation of his relationship with his chosen family becomes critical; in a conversation with Rubai, he reveals that he tries to religiously visit the Afghan village he calls home every year to celebrate Eid.

It is this recognition – or relocation – of celebration into the chosen family that brings us back to the “master of ambiguity” that Shah Rukh Khan is (Deepa Sreenivas and Bindu Menon, also contributors to this series, pointed this out candidly while discussing his tweet appreciating the new parliament building in India). It is perhaps for this ambiguity that “ek Shahrukh mein pura Hindustan basta hai” (“in one Shah Rukh the entire Hindustan resides” [emphasis added]; Katyal qtd. in HT Entertainment Desk 2021).

In this exercise, we have attempted to read Pathaan reparatively by squinting through our queer eyes to open up methodological provocations around gaze and ways of seeing, at the risk of being seen as ascribing queerness to what might be otherwise seen as primarily unqueer, or even counter queer. In positing imaginations of militarised collectivities that allow for a reconstitution of identity and a reclamation of power as a putative ‘home’, we have tried to demonstrate how a reparative reading through queer eyes makes way for potential queering. We hope this opens up further possibilities of seeing – and by way, ascribing – the queer in the unqueer.

Notes

¹ Paromita Vohra, another contributor to this series, offered us this word in a candid and heartwarming conversation.

² Interestingly, while queer and transgender people have been framed largely as lacking a procreative potential by mechanisms of the nation-state (Datta and Kumar 2023), it is the procreative abilities of (cisgender) women that lead to their elimination from the military. In 2020, when the Supreme Court of India suggested that the Indian army consider evaluating women on equal footing as men for combat roles, the army responded by citing issues of “confinement, motherhood and childcare” as a few reasons for not accepting women in these positions (Biswas 2020).

³ Pathaan is, however, not the first or only movie where Shah Rukh Khan is shown to exist in an ‘alternative’ or non-normative kinship structure. In Swades (2004), like Gita Chadha in her memoir from this series points out, Khan plays the role of Mohan Bhargava, an NRI scientist who pines for his dai, i.e., his nanny from childhood, who he likens (but doesn’t equate) to his mother. Here, rather than the genetic understanding of parenthood, the movie paints parenthood through sustained care across involved parties.

References:

Bhattacharya, S. (2021). Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence. Harper Collins.

Entertainment Desk, HT. (2021). “Akhil Katyal’s Poem on Shah Rukh Khan Goes Viral; Neeraj Ghaywan, Swara Bhasker, Kanika Dhillon React”. Hindustan Times, Retrieved from https://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/bollywood/akhil-katyal-s-poem-on-shah-rukh-khan-goes-viral-neeraj-ghaywan-swara-bhasker-kanika-dhillon-react-101634008120317.html.

Sedgwick, E.K. (1997). “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”. Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. EK Sedgewick, pp. 1-37, Duke University Press.

Kumar, P. (2018). “Queering Indian Sociology: A Critical Engagement”. Explorations, 2(1), pp. 61-85.

Ellis, D. (2021). “The Danger – and Necessity – of Paranoid Reading”. Book Riot, Retrieved from https://bookriot.com/paranoid-reading/.

Baker, M. (2014). “Translation as Re-Narration”. Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 158-177, Springer.

Abi-Karam, A., and Gabriel, K. (2020). We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Nightboat Books: New York.

Purayil, A.P. (2022). “‘Families We Choose’: Kinship Patterns Among Migrant Transmen in Bangalore, India”. Transgender India, ed. DA Vakoch, pp. 183-193.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). An Outline of Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Kumar, P. (2020). “Deterritorializing Heteronormative Family and Kinship: Hybrid Existence and Queer Intimacies in Contemporary India”. Exploring Sociabilities of Contemporary India: New Perspectives, ed. S Patel, pp. 170-198, Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.

Blunt, A., and Dowling, R. (2006). Home: Key Ideas in Geography. Routledge: New York.

Spade, D., and Belkin, A. (2021). “Queer Militarism?!: The Politics of Military Inclusion Advocacy in Authoritarian Times”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 27(2), pp. 281-307.

Montegary, L. (2015). “Militarizing US Homonormativities: The Making of ‘Ready, Willing, and Able’ Gay Citizens”. Signs, 40(4), pp. 891-915.

Irvine, J.M., and Irvine, J.A. (2017). “The Queer Work of Militarized Prides”. Contexts, 16(4), pp. 32-37.

Upadhyay, N. (2020). “Hindu Nation and Its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/Coloniality in India”. Interventions, 22(4), pp. 464-480.

Vohra, P. (2023). “Vasantasena’s Lynchpin, Memory Games, and Re-membering in Pathaan: A Reading in Three Scenes”. Doing Sociology. https://doingsociology.org/2023/07/30/vasantasenas-lychpin-memory-games-and-re-membering-in-pathaan-a-reading-in-three-scenes-paromita-vohra/

Datta, S., & Kumar, P. (2023). “Science, State and Procreative Conundrums: A Transgender Perspective”. Law School Policy Review, Retrieved from https://lawschoolpolicyreview.com/2023/05/28/science-state-and-procreative-conundrums-a-transgender-perspective/.

Biswas, S. (2020). “India’s Soldiers ‘Not Ready For Women in Combat’”, BBC News, Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51385224.

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Sayantan Datta is a science journalist and a faculty member at the Centre for Writing and Pedagogy, Krea University. Bishal is doing their PhD at Homi Bhabha Centre For Science Education-Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (HBCSE-TIFR), Mumbai.